Toward an EcoFeminist Analysis of The EUs Green Deal

The EU’s Green Deal makes bold promises. It aims to achieve net-zero targets by 2050 and to ensure that the transition to a decarbonised economy is ‘just and inclusive’. The Green Deal promises to put ‘sustainability and the well-being of citizens at the centre of economic policy, and the sustainable development goals at the heard of the EU’s policy making and action’. The Deal promises ‘a set of deeply transformative policies’ spanning across almost all areas of EU policy. This paper asks how transformative the EU’s Green Deal really is, by applying ecofeminist analyses. These critiques have pointed out how exploitation, extraction, dumping, and irresponsibility is actively promoted and incentivised in the current globalised economy, accruing profits to the Global North and driving ‘growth’ (Cohen 2017; Harcourt et al. 2015; Resurrección 2017; Wichterich 2015; Wynter 2003). They also highlight the gendered and racialized power relations that maintain ecologically unsustainable and unjust economic practices in the Global North; and gendered and racialised images and epistemologies that make them appear ‘natural’ or legitimate (Dengler and Strunk 2018; Salleh 2020; Shiva and Mies 2014; Di Chiro 2019). Applying these kinds of critiques, this paper examines the notions of justice embedded in the EU’s green deal. It asks whose well-being is included in the EU’s concepts of justice (Wichterich 2015; Douo 2021); and how the EU’s continued pursuit of growth in the Green Deal perpetuates or departs from existing hall marks of the EU’s economic organisation and integration - gendered social reproductive subsidies (Cavaghan and Elomaki 2021) environmental exploitation and environmental racism (Parasram and Tilley 2018; Hansen and Jonsson 2018).